Man marries body pillow girlfriend in Korea

The UK Metro is reporting on a wedding ceremony held for a 28-year old Korean man and his full-sized body pillow girlfriend. The pillow cover supposedly has an image of a character named Fate Testarossa from the anime series Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha.

I think the reason is simple. Yesterday, he was that guy. Today, he’s that guy all over the web. And anyway, doesn’t the woman have to say “I do” or pop a feather or something to signal assent?
Why am I asking these things?

South Korea is an odd place, where men marry pillows, Star Craft is a sport and parents abandon their real children to death by malnutrition because they are too busy doting on the virtual one that they spawned in an MMO.

So if someone else wants to marry their body pillow with the same character on it is it considered cheating? Can the body pillow get a lawyer and file for divorce? Is it polygamy if he decides to buy a younger body pillow and marry that one as well? Is it cheating if his doctor tells him he needs a tempur-pedic pillow for his horrible necks pains?…. So many questions

There’s a lot of self-insertion fan fiction out there, but I don’t know of any that comes from east Asia — any doujinshi or anything. And much SI, if not most, involves the SI character getting it on with their preferred character. It makes me wonder if the concept of “fictional character as object of desire” actually manifests differently in the different cultures. In this case, the “desire” seems kind of vague. I don’t think this guy’s actually “interacting” with Fate, even in his imagination. And she can’t give informed consent. She WOULDN’T, anyway, because she has Nanoha; besides, what would HE be to HER? Some guy from Nanoha and Hayate’s planet, one of apparently thousands who buy figurines and posters of her.

Unless he thinks of it as marrying the pillow itself, in which case the logic and emotions of it are completely alien to me.

Forgot to add.. the one child policy was enacted in 1978, so many of the children of that policy have long since joined the fray. I would love to see what effect it has had on their society and on the individuals.

Articles like this always seems to stimulate a bout of racial chauvinism in the comments… as if we don’t have plenty of weirdos of our own. Why is this? Is it just because they’re weird in a way which is surprising to us?

I would rather have this guy than Karl Rove as a member of my society any day, and I bet he would be a lot more fun to know.

I find it more worrying that BoingBoing is referencing The UK Metro, a “free” tabloid newspaper that (IMHO) blights our public transport system and is aimed at the hearts and minds of the traveller with a reading age of about 8.
As long as the guy and the pillow are happy together who cares ?
I suspect that this is just another “look at stupid johnny foreigner” photo opportunity.
If the pillow had a PHD they never would have published it.

Ever since that 30rock episode I’ve wondered, what happens when the silk screening wears off the front of the pillowcase? Is he attracted to that specific pillowcase, or can they be interchangeable? Would replacing a worn out case with an identical one be like dating “her” sister?

Does anyone have pics of these guys carting their pillow-women around in public?

I’m tryiing to figure out if the guys marrying these characters are doing it as a tongue in cheek commentary on their otaku subcultures, or if this is genuine or somewhere along a spectrum between the two.

Well the DS guy did it for fun, this guy’s probably in the same boat. I remember reading articles about the kid marrying his DS character and they were talking about how he’s actually perfectly normal and is able to interact with other (real) people normally.
I think these guys are sitting back at home and laughing at the ruckus they’re able to cause here just by doing something silly that, to most people, is pretty obviously a joke.

This is wrong. God defined marriage between a man and a biological entity. I was even there at the meeting when he formulated this socio-politcal arrangement. A pillow COULD marry a man, and not enact God’s fury, IF the pillow was made of organic materials, such as a dead camel, or a living camel, or some sort of camel variant. Also, organic bio-structures, or slurries, that are not camels.